A Dunning-Kruger manifesto about vaccines and autism

I’ve frequently written about the “arrogance of ignorance,” a phenomenon that anyone who’s paid attention to what quacks, cranks, or antivaccine activists (but I repeat myself) write and say beyond a certain period of time will have encountered. Basically, it’s the belief found in such people—and amplified in groups—that somehow they can master a subject as well or better than experts who have spent their entire professional lives studying the subject on their own, often just through the use of Google University and the echo chamber discussion forums that they frequent with their fellow cranks. Thus we have, for example, the rambling clown car of antivaccine bloggers over at the crank blog Age of Autism declaring that, contrary to the mountains of evidence otherwise, vaccines cause autism, “brain damage,” autoimmune diseases and all sorts of mean and nasty other conditions. Skeptics quite properly point out that (1) there is no convincing evidence from well-designed and well-executed studies to support these links; (2) there is a lot of evidence from well-designed and well-executed studies that there is no link between vaccines and these conditions given that such studies invariably are unable to detect differences in the prevalence of these conditions associated with vaccines (or, in the case of the mercury militia, thimerosal-containing vaccines); meaning (3) the most parsimonious explanation for these results is that there almost certainly no link. What is the response? Antivaccine cranks will invoke the pharma shill gambit and all sorts of dire conspiracies on the part of the CDC, big pharma, the FDA, and the World Health Organization (WHO) to “suppress” smoking gun evidence that vaccines cause autism.

This is a well-known phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, a phenomenon whereby people who are unknowledgeable or incompetent about a topic hold an unjustifiably elevated estimate of their own knowledge base on the topic. In the antivaccine movement, the Dunning-Kruger effect tends to take the form of parents who think that their University of Google knowledge trumps the knowledge of physicians and scientists who have dedicated large swaths of their lives to the rigorous study of conditions such as autism and the question of how vaccines work; in other words, exactly the arrogance of ignorance I just discussed. Nowhere is the Dunning-Kruger effect more concentrated than in a certain relatively young antivaccine crank blog that basically declares its arrogantly ignorant Dunning-Kruger in its very name. I’m referring, of course, to The Thinking Moms’ Revolution (a.k.a. TMR), or, as I like to call it, The (Not So-)Thinking Moms’ Revolution. Basically, depending on whether it’s day or night, it’s a coffee or wine klatch of mostly affluent, educated women who clearly don’t understand how easy it is for educated people to fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect and become good at motivated reasoning to defend a false viewpoint. And nowhere on the TMR website thus far have I seen a more concentrated example of all these traits, as in a post from earlier this week called the The Thinking Moms’ Manifesto. It’s 4,100 words of weaponized Dunning-Kruger, arrogance, and motivated reasoning.
You wouldn’t know it at the beginning because its author, known as “The Rev” (real name: Lisa Goes), jokes about how critics have sometimes dubbed TMR the “Drinking Moms’ Revolution,” based on the moms’ frequent mentions of how they like wine and their propensity to gather together periodically to indulge that like. (Another annoying characteristic of TMR is that its bloggers take on some truly annoying pseudonyms that range from the height of Dunning-Kruger arrogance, such as “The Professor,” to the cutesy, such as “Princess,” to the faux fantasy cool, such as “Dragonslayer” or “Goddess.”) I’ll give The Rev credit for a momentary bit of amusing self-awareness. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last long, as, after the introduction, she lays down “guidelines” for what “Thinking Moms” do and believe. The first one is easily dispensed with, in that she simply declares, “If you call yourself a Thinking Mom, you treat every organization that recognizes what has happened to our children and wishes to advance their cause with respect,” which then is followed by a list of some of the quackiest, crankiest sites on the Internet, such as Age of Autism, Gary Null, NaturalNews.com, Mercola.com, GreenMedInfo, VacTruth, the Canary Party, and many others. You get the idea. If you’re a “Thinking Mom,” you treat pseudoscience and quackery websites with “respect,” but in reality you go beyond that. You believe them rather than real science.

But, if you’re not a “Thinker” yet, don’t worry, The Rev’s got you covered. In the context of supporting a frequent criticism that we skeptics make about alternative medicine and the antivaccine movement, specifically that no woo is ever rejected and every woo is equally valid (even when they are mutually contradictory in their basis and claims), The Rev lets everyone know that they should just STFU (in public, at least) if they disagree with an organization or think it did them wrong:

If you feel you’ve been maligned or disrespected by a fellow activist or organization, please wait at least 72 hours before you choose to act on your feelings. If you cannot let it go, take the issue directly to the person who caused offense instead of social media. Above all, when talking to new parents, do NOT trash a particular organization because you felt wronged by them. New parents are overwhelmed and confused enough by the very nature of what has just happened to their child. Your slight, no matter how great, is of no interest to them. They want to know how to save their child’s life and give them a future, and, most likely, you are their first point of contact. Right now, we are being closely watched by everyone, including pre-Thinkers — there are no non-Thinkers, just pre-Thinkers hungry for the truth and learning discernment skills! While it may seem we are repeatedly preaching to the choir and our hard work is going unnoticed, on the contrary, we are under a microscope. Shine with dignity and admiration for your peers under this scrutiny. In addition to supporting our fellow organizations, RAVE about and proliferate the films that have been independently produced and are being shown around this country thanks to the blood, sweat and tears of their makers, concerned citizens and affected families.

Doesn’t this sound a bit like religion? Of course it does. There’s the emphasis on never speaking ill of a quack organization coupled with the idea that everyone out there is a potential convert. Apparently they don’t even view skeptics as “non-Thinkers” but rather as potentially convertible, although I’ll admit that’s not entirely clear that The Rev isn’t just referring to parents of children with autism and developmental disorders. She probably is. Whatever the case, not surprisingly, the list of movies that follows includes some incredibly quacky movies, such as The Greater Good.

This idea that nothing, no matter how quacky, should be rejected, that there is nothing (other than the evil big pharma vaccine-industrial complex, of course) that isn’t potentially helpful to autistic children, shows up in item #3 of The Rev’s manifesto, “The paths to recovery are many, and Thinkers acknowledge them all“:

Some parents cut out gluten and dairy, get a little OT, and spend a couple of years with a qualified MAPS doctor and their severely affected seizure kid is on the honor roll and captain of the football team. Some parents follow a multitude of protocols, see mainstream and alternative doctors, shell out thousands upon thousands of dollars, and potty training and pointing at the age of nine are considered monumental victories. I know kids who have fully recovered with dietary intervention, ABA and a parasite protocol. I know kids who are virtually indiscernible from their peers having used mitochondrial supports, mainstream gastrointestinal treatment and nutritional intervention. I also know kids who are rocking their high school years with nothing but Son-Rise and nutritional modification. There are quite literally hundreds of paths to recovery and improvement. I am partial to the protocols offered through AIM. Several of my friends have dropped 30+ ATEC points by using CEASE homeopathic intervention. Still others enjoy great progress with homotoxicology and neurofeedback. Since we know the one-size-fits-all immunization program is what landed many of us in this elite club, resist the temptation to narrowly define recovery. Because something worked for you does not mean it will work for them, and because it worked for them, it will not necessarily work for you. Thinking Moms know labs are crucial in accurately diagnosing a child’s specific metabolic and autoimmune anomalies. While you may have developed disdain for western preventative healthcare, you know when it comes to replacing a limb, stopping a heart attack, and piecing people back together after traumatic accidents and injuries, there is no better treatment option than allopathic medicine. Yet, you also know you must promote and protect our right to pursue homeopathy, herbalism, naturopathy, chiropractic, nutritional intervention, medical marijuana, etc. Thinkers fight not to destroy one, but to embrace all treatments so that our kids may have access to every healing option and treatment modality available to improve the quality of their lives.

Homeopathy, as I’ve described more times than I can remember, is The One Quackery To Rule Them All (possibly in concert with reiki and other forms of energy healing). It’s magic. It’s the idea that diluting a remedy makes it stronger, even unto diluting it far beyond the point where a single molecule is likely to remain. Similarly, naturopathy, which encompasses homeopathy, is what I like to refer to as a cornucopia of virtually every quackery known to humankind. Basically, The Rev’s manifesto is a defense of autism biomed quackery and for “Thinkers” never to criticize any of it because, if you are a “Thinker,” you have to believe that someone, somewhere, will benefit from almost anything, no matter how vile the quackery.

Knowing what I know about TMR and “autism biomed,” I must admit, that I nearly spit out my coffee as I read #2, which claims, “When it comes to helping others, Thinking Moms are short on opinion, strong on scientific data, medical facts, nutritional healing options and documented legislative history.”

I’ll pause a minute. (Or two. Or three. Or ten.) If you know anything about the level of pseudoscience regularly promoted by TMR (and what I quoted above is just a taste, albeit one that comes after item #2), you’ll need it to bring your laughter under control. Seriously. But there’s more, so much more. In addition to having promoted homeopathy and energy healing, TMR has featured a woman named Laura Hirsch (pseudonym: Oracle) who has “learned Reconnective Healing and Quantum Touch, used homeopathy, essential oils, and flower essences, used EAV (electroacupuncture) and muscle testing for diagnosing” and “consulted with mediums to get answers from the spirit world” to help her son. Its book is loaded with anecdotes of autistic children treated with such quackery.

It’s all in the delivery, Thinkers. Suggest, don’t attack. Sometimes you just leave studies and do not say a word. Sometimes you listen and listen make one comment about causation and move on to something else. I know to us it feels disingenuous. “So Rev, if I’m at a dinner party you’re basically telling me to whisper to my hosts, ‘Hey those shiners, that headbanging, and posturing? Those are all signs that little PJ’s mitochondria is on fire. Those fever relievers you keep shoving down his throat are depleting glutathione. He needs a metabolic panel and organic acid test (OAT), stat. Pass the salt and pepper please.’” I know it feels wrong addressing something of such significance with such passivity, but trust us when we tell you people cannot hear you at the beginning stages of the discovery process if you are screaming at them.

In other words, be nice to convert “pre-Thinkers” to fully actualized, quackery-loving “Thinkers.”

Closely related to this is #4, which tells Thinkers that you can’t judge other Thinkers on the level of recovery their children have achieved (which is convenient, given that the vast majority of autism biomed is quackery), “Not all recovery is created equal, and not all Thinkers must approach it the same way“:

Thinking Moms do not measure the value of other Thinking Moms, based on the level of progress their child has made toward recovery. Please know that if I hear a single solitary self-proclaimed Thinking Mom allow the phrases, “Well, you know, she just didn’t follow through . . . ” or even worse, “You know, if it was my kid I would have done XYZ . . . ” to pass from their lips within earshot of other humans, I will sincerely lose my sh%t. You have not walked in their shoes. You do not know their story. You do not know their life. You do not sleep with them, eat with them, live with them, or deposit money in their bank account. You hear snippets of their perspective and form judgments that may or may not be accurate. Always give other Thinkers, and all parents with affected kids for that matter, the benefit of the doubt and treat them with understanding and compassion.

Even if they’re subjecting their child to bleach enemas, dubious “stem cell” injections by lumbar puncture (even if you have to hit your child’s grandparents up for $15,000), or dangerous chelation therapy, apparently, you must not criticize or, worst of all, be “judgmental.” Well, the hell with that! If someone is subjecting a vulnerable child (and, make no mistake, autistic children are among the most vulnerable of all), I’m damned well going to criticize and be “judgmental.” I understand that these parents often have good motivations and believe that what they are doing will help, but at the very least I can try to warn others away from their quackery.

The rest of the items in The Rev’s manifesto aren’t quite as amusing, as they are rather standard, dull platitudes about how, “Thinking Moms’ ditch canned positivism in favor of authentic outreach,” which apparently means providing tangible help without looking for acclaim, which would be all well and good were it not yoked to items #1 through #4 and activity such as that described in #6, “Healthy boundaries are essential for all Thinking Parents“:

I was enlisted to help a child here in Chicago, whose mother allegedly took his life after many years of seeking support and help through hospitals and government aid. His story is chronicled in the award-winning documentary Who Killed Alex Spourdalakis? Having had this incredibly valuable life experience, I can tell you this: The child is always worth saving, despite the condition or situation of the parent. However, you must always ask yourself with great sincerity, “What is it that I have to give?” At the time I became involved with Alex, my son was profoundly affected. Our first TMR book had just launched, and I was the point person for public relations. But I delved headfirst into documenting Alex’s plight, despite this responsibility and the fact that I was managing tremendously complex medical and nutritional protocols at a time when a good night’s sleep amounted to three hours. Despite all our core team of seven attempted to do to help Alex, he died.

No, no, no, no, no! Yes, Alex did die, but, despicably, The Rev couched her version of his death in passive doublespeak that makes it sound as though it just happened, as bad things sometimes do. “Oh, Alex just died.” Worse, The Rev makes it sound as though Alex died despite her best efforts, when in fact what she appeared to be trying to do was to facilitate access to “autism biomed” quackery through “Autism Is Medical.” No, he was murdered by his mother after Andrew Wakefield had swooped into his hospital to be a publicity whore over the case during the Autism One quackfest in 2013 in the hopes of making a documentary over the alleged “injustices” done to him. Later, the antivaccine reporter Sharyl Attkisson (whom we’ve encountered many times before, going back to 2007) did a biased report that conveniently left out Andrew Wakefield’s involvement in the Alex Spourdalakis case. AI put it at the time, Attkisson lied by omission. She was also widely criticized, although my criticism once again led to an antivaccine activist trying to harass me at my job.

The Rev ends up by pontificating, “If you are truly a Thinking Mom, you are defined by what you are FOR, rather than what you are AGAINST” and how burdened they are with this Sacred Knowledge They Don’t Want You To Know About:

While we get with great clarity the immense burden associated with the knowledge we now carry, our commitment is to spread the truth, not destroy the liars. It is our hope that everyone will align under the guise of the whole-body medical model that benefits all our kids and embraces individualized healthcare, authentic nutrition, and integrative healing. This is what Thinking Moms embrace and fight for.

In other words, TMR is fighting for autism biomed quackery, which is something we didn’t need 4,100 words to discover. They wrap it in motherly camaraderie and extreme Dunning-Kruger, but at their core that’s what TMR stands for.

@Shay: re parasite control – you know that’s code name for MMS, right? (I assume, but want to make sure for anyone who is new to this).

And, since I didn’t really explain what MMS is other than through links to it, MMS is “miracle medical solution,” which consists of a solution of 28% sodium chlorite in distilled water that generates chlorine dioxide when diluted with citric acid-containing or other acid-containing substances. It is, in essence, a form of bleach. It’s the quackery promoted by Kerri Rivera, who claims that MMS enemas (or, as I call them, bleach enemas) eliminate “parasites” from the colon.

When a pseudomedicine fan talks about a “parasite protocol,” you can’t necessarily tell when the person is talking about curing parasites (which probably aren’t there) or deliberately infecting someone with parasites. That’s pretty telling all by itself, that both are considered cures for the same types of symptoms.

Mitochondria on fire… or the fact the poor kid is overstimulated and is trying to calm themselves down, and should be helped to find relaxing behaviors that don’t result in self-injury and/or given a chance to get out of the dinner party and go somewhere quiet and safe.

Do these ‘Thinking Moms’ actually talk to autistic people, or do they pathologize anything that’s not acceptably normal and introduce dubious to abusive cures? I always get the impression that such groups seem to think autism vanishes at age 18 and/or that autistic folks are perpetual pre-schoolers. Maybe it’s just because it’s a parent group not a group for autistic people, but one would think checking in with autistic adults and their families would be comforting or informative.

Unfortunately, I’ve read TMs and their assorted sisters, advocate BOTH implantation of helminths and foreign microbiota ( the latter via poop) AND the destruction of intestinal parasites through MMS and other ‘treatments’. One of the TMs wrote about her child’s parasites going wild around full moons. The post was called ‘Moon Madness’ or “Lunacy’- which it clearly was.

I’ve had the dubious pleasure of watching the Rev in action, by a video of the TMs’ presentation at AutismOne 2015 titled “How Not to Die”, which I nearly did after 57 minutes of undiluted Thinking Mom Girrrl Power ( on TMR’s facebook )
The Rev appears to be a take-charge individual who confidently spews her woo and exudes an aura of superiority. The Rev, obviously, preaches.

TMR has enjoyed a position of privilege this year at AutismOne**, hosting a lounge ( for thinking, drinking and
b!tching). and presenting several times including giving a writing workshop.

When I read Goes’ Manifesto the other day I thought to myself- as I do whenever I observe such a grand effort going into the production of such drivel ( see Gamondes’ finale @ AoA)- if the perpetrator indeed has her head screwed on tightly enough. When a woo-meister goes on and on. at least he is selling something. Instead, these ladies have an axe to grind and a point to prove:
they are brilliant, far above the average, which is perhaps compensation for being ‘wasted’ as caregivers or even, if I dare mention it, POSSIBLY because some of their children have intellectual disabilities and will never be the shining star of academia to his or her mother’s delight who can be admired by all from afar. THUS their anger is directed at the offending agencies – the government, pharma, SBM- who destrotyed their child- which is certainly better than directing it at the child who has ‘failed’ them ( through no fault of his or her own).

** Bolen informs us that AoA is out- one member was even tossed at this year’s festivities ( Bolen Report, yesterday).Fearless Parent and Segal’s Focus on Autism/ Health are in.

As I have said before in a few different places, if there was any convincing evidence for vaccines (or anything else for that matter) causing autism pretty much everyone who works in CAMHS and paediatrics would be marching on our Department of Health demanding action to remove that preventative factor.

I mean, it’s not like we would be short of things to do without autism – I would have been able to concentrate more on self-harm, gender identity and the other areas which interested me more, rather than have to start the ball rolling on ASD assessments…

RobRN & shay: Assuming that “ProfessorTMR” is correct about the case not yet coming to trial, it would be correct to claim that Alex’s mother is the alleged murderer, but not that Alex was allegedly murdered. (Based on what I know of the case, I am not aware of any other plausible suspect, but the prosecution has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense may well be playing for a manslaughter conviction rather than murder, though I would not expect that ploy to work here.) It says something about “ProfessorTMR” that (s)he seems to have mentally inserted the phrase “by his mother” after “Alex was murdered”.

I have run across info on legitimate research into helminth therapy for certain autoimmune diseases.

As for bleach enemas, I do not believe, but don’t know for sure, that there are any parasitic worms of humans, other than pinworms, which are tiny, that live low enough in the large intestine to be within reach of a conventional enema. Certainly eggs and proglottids will pass through, but none would even remotely resemble the physical structure of what the child torturers claim are expelled parasites.

@Shay: she is either suggesting that absent conviction, it’s alleged to be a murder and maybe the result will be different – maybe hoping for an insanity defense, or a plea bargain with a lesser charge – or she’s alluding vaguely to the documentary’s claim that the real killer is the medical system that failed Alex. Not sure.

Lisa Goes is the very same who boasted of stalking and barking orders at medical staff at the hospital where Alex was and is now extolling the virtues of subtlety? I’d love to be in the presence of one of these skanks at a social event when they start spewing their “medical” diagnoses and advice.

Doesn’t the myriad of different “treatments” coupled with the myriad criteria for “improvement” show that the entire process is just random? A good example of the human propensity to find patterns in random noise?

I cannot stand these horrible people. I hate them. They torment autistic kids, have no compassion for them. Don’t even TRY to understand the world through their eyes or empathize with them and they want people to shut up and just blindly follow their ridiculous child torturing cult? I think NOT!

Lisa Goes is the very same who boasted of stalking and barking orders at medical staff at the hospital where Alex was and is now extolling the virtues of subtlety?

Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Otherwise I would have mentioned it in my post. 🙂

Of course, she would likely claim that she’s yelling at the ignorant doctors and nurses who don’t understand autism biomed but would never, ever treat a parent of an autistic child that way. Somehow I doubt that’s true.

Intriguingly enough, I scanned TMR’s posts by author and there don’t seem to be any archived for The Rev.
I may be mistaken but I recall that around the time of Alex’s death, Goes said that she’d take some time off from writing.
I remember that she wrote quite regularly there.

Even more curiously, there don’t appear to be any of her posts saved at AoA either. ( She was rather active at both cesspits of unreasonability) I wonder why that is?

Yeah, the TMR moms are all wackadoodle. An entire manifesto to lay out the facts that you support any type of woo out there that any parent wants to force on their poor child without judgment while simultaneously espousing the belief that everyone in the woo world should just smile sweetly at each other while unicorns fart rainbows in the background. Its a creepy cult world they live in.
@Denice – Re Alex – I wouldn’t be surprised if they scrubbed things off the interwebs after the murder and pending trial. They still defend themselves of course, because they were only trying to ‘help’ but I guarantee none of them want to get caught up in court. I think most of them have enough sense left to know that what they did was wrong, and they don’t want to take chances. Plus given the lengths of quackery and outright torture these parents get up to with their own children I doubt any of them want family services checking in to what they are doing with their kids.

Indeed. I’d be shocked if Lisa Goes, at least, hasn’t already been questioned by the police and perhaps even the DA, given the involvement of her and “Autism Is Medical” with Dorothy Spourdalakis before the killing.

I’d be shocked if Lisa Goes, at least, hasn’t already been questioned by the police and perhaps even the [Cook County State’s Attorney]….

Well, Goes isbased in the area,* but given that the mess she helped make proved to be too much for delicate sensibilities and led to her unceremoniously dumping them in advance, I suspect that the real interest would be from the side of the defense, if there’s going to be much of one.

I was about to say that there were two possible reasons Goes might be of interest to the defense (one that would put her on the hook), but it turns out that diminished capacity isn’t a recognized defense in Illinois.

shay:
“Our resident legal minds can sort this one out, but how do multiple stab wounds translate to ‘alleged’ murder?”
I am reminded of the NYPD detective I once saw on the evening news who referred to “the alleged decedent.”
In any case, in most jurisdictions, it’s the coroner or equivalent who makes the determination of homicide. Whether or not that homicide is murder is determined at trial, assuming there is a conviction.

Thank you, Cranky Spider. I think we all need to read what you have written again from time to time. It’s simple truth that helps us to keep our eyes on the ball.
Also, as someone with an autism spectrum condition, and as the uncle of an autistic person who has been raised with love and science both, I appreciate it.

Whether or not the prosecution’s case proves that that homicide is murder is determined at trial

Modify’d. There’s also the matter of lesser included offenses, but one would have to look at model jury instructions. What it boils down to is merely whether one is a convicted murderer, not whether the three elements were actually present. The jury is the trier of fact, but that extends only to those that it can extract from the state’s presentation.

I think a lot of these mom’s forget that even without treatment, children may lose the ASD diagnosis at a rate as high as 25% (the debate over whether those kids actually had ASD or something like it is a debate for another day).

Even amongst those children who never lose their diagnosis, most eventually make some degree of progress against their symptoms (this is a condition of neurodevelopmental delay, after all – not stagnation).

So it is entirely conceivable that a majority of the children subjected to any random quack protocol (or no protocol for that matter) get better, even if there were no confirmation bias on the part of the parents.

Yet they still wonder why doctors insist on clinical trials instead of anecdotes….

But what does this logic matter anyway? If your child doesn’t get better, you weren’t doing it right, or you weren’t thinking positively enough, or wait wait, try THIS type of enema instead!

Always give other Thinkers, and all parents with affected kids for that matter, the benefit of the doubt and treat them with understanding and compassion.

Understanding? Absolutely. Compassion? Were it anything like the compassion they show their own disabled children, they’d be shackled to Rev. Humble, pushed in a ditch, and buried in lye. Narcissistic child abusers should consider themselves lucky if harsh words are the worst they receive; jail terms would be far more appropriate.

It’s good to see that everyone is so sure about the subjects they’re making fun of.

You link to a couple of articles looking at helminth therapy as a possible area of research to see if it might help autoimmune disorders, and if so what the dangers might be. It’s an interesting area of research. Don’t you see the difference between this and a parent deliberately infecting their child with a parasitic organism (and who knows what else as well) for a condition that may or may not even be autoimmune in nature?

Years ago I suffered an incompletely treated parasitic infection for over a decade and it was horrible*. I was constantly sick and fatigued and would not wish that experience on anyone. The idea that some well-meaning but deluded parent might inflict that on their child horrifies me.

I can think of a dozen different treatments that might be beneficial for autism but which might also kill or permanently disable a child. I won’t mention them in case someone gives them a go.

* Incidentally, for the record, I tried Hulda Clark’s parasite program out of sheer desperation but it did not work, even with a zapper (I made it myself so it didn’t cost much, but still felt a fool using it), but Big Pharma drugs did, once I managed to convince my doctor to prescribe them.

Certainly there is a difference if a parent takes some “medical” action without the requisite knowledge or information. However, comments like “A parasite protocol? What, they make the kid wear a flea collar?” simply display the poster’s ignorance, which is directly on par with the parent making such medical decisions.

In short, there’s a lot of research going on and there is much that is unknown, so to arbitrarily ridicule people, especially when it is clear that the posters are unfamiliar with the topic, makes them look foolish.

It’s good to see that everyone is so sure about the subjects they’re making fun of.

Gadam, feeding your child raw pork or a “smoothie” made from faecal samples taken from a family member to ingest are hardly in the realm of helminth therapy for autoimmune conditions. Which, by the by as Krebiozen already stated, is still in the research phase and not yet ready for prime time. What we are (rightfully) mocking are literally DIY treatments because some shitwit read what you just posted.

“In short, there’s a lot of research going on and there is much that is unknown, so to arbitrarily ridicule people, especially when it is clear that the posters are unfamiliar with the topic, makes them look foolish.”

Ridiculing these people is *exactly* what we should be doing. There is a lot of research going on, and a lot that is unknown. These parents are forcing treatments on their children when no one knows what the treatments will do!

Throwing random chemicals at your children is child abuse – it doesn’t matter that you hope it will turn out alright.

It seems there is no quackery too quacky for the drinking moms. Perhaps they should lay off the juice a bit.

In reality I feel that has has this exactly to rights. These are a group of narcissistic child abusers who define themselves by their children’s disability and simply won’t accept that the best way to deal with genetically-inherited disorders is to manage the symptoms, not assume their is a cure out there.

I have seen this sort of sickening attitude elsewhere. As the parent of two children with a genetically-inherited disability I gave up associating with other parents with the condition due to narcissists like the drinking moms turning up. The madness they were putting their children through and injecting this into useful discussions like how to get the Education Department to provide appropriate facilities to schools just sickened me. If I didn’t stop having any dealings with these people, I was going to be incredibly rude to them.

I am still on the list of contacts for new parents though. My key message to them is: it is not that difficult to manage the condition, here are some tips and contacts (and we have managed to import a crate of a very useful device from the US and if you want one, just drop around and pick it up at no cost) and take the time out to enjoy your children as much as you can.

children who received a dose of the MMR vaccine before age four had a risk of ASD diagnosis by age four that was more than twice as high as children who received a dose after age four but before age five (Ratio=2.23, 95% CI 1.23-4.05)

Actual PEPI output:

INVERSE SAMPLING
The following results are applicable if, in each group
(A and B), subjects were added until a prespecified
number of cases (subjects with “Yes”) were found.

Why doesn’t it seem apparent to them that if no two recoveries followed the same therapeutic path, then the therapies can’t be said to have been the agent of the purported recovery?

I mean- we’re supposed to have one cause here, right? The evil vaccines? Why is does one thing have some specific (if unknown) mechanism of action that causes all the damage, but there’s not one discover-able solution to this specific cause?

It just doesn’t make sense. Cause and effect can be fairly complex in some cases, but not THAT complex. Somewhere there has to be a trail one can follow.

Why not just admit that kids with glutathione deficiency are vulnerable to toxic metals and be done with it? Why pretend that multiple vaccinations in a single session can easily exceed the EPA’s recommendations for human exposure to aluminum?
What is it about “skeptics” that make them so gullible?

Correction: Why not just admit that kids with glutathione deficiency are vulnerable to toxic metals and be done with it? Why pretend that multiple vaccinations in a single session can’t easily exceed the EPA’s recommendations for human exposure to aluminum?
What is it about “skeptics” that make them so gullible?

What is it about rich winkel that makes them so ignorant of chemistry.

The EPA has established no RfD for aluminium. It has done for aluminium phosphide (a fumigant) of 0.0004 mg/kg/day. However, there is no aluminium phosphide in vaccines. The aluminium salts used as adjuvants are aluminium hydroxide, potassium aluminium sulfate and aluminium phosphate.

Narad (comment # 83): Actually, there is a genetic disease called ‘glutathione synthetase deficiency’, with mild to severe forms. The problem for woo-believers is this is a very rare disorder, with no more than 80 affected people in the world out of 7 billion, and everyone affected has hemolytic anemia.http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/glutathione-synthetase-deficiency
Unfortunately for us non-woo-believers, people like rich w are resistant to reality, so they latch onto a real disorder, no matter how rare, and “diagnose” everyone with science-y soundin’ words. Ironically, we’re seeing the Dunning-Kruger effect in action… in reply to a blog post about D-K.

I went back and am proud to announce that I DID find Goes’ posts about the late Alex BUT as I said previously, there doesn’t appear to be coverage of his death by her while posts between December and March are featured ( hospital). I believe he died 2-3 months later.

re “Oh bloody hell”

@ Science Mom:

He doesn’t appear to be learning very much, does he?

I am forever mystified that he somehow has managed to get this far- picking up degrees from decent universities despite his unceasing blather and lack of contact with reality in any manner that relates to what he is studying.

Occasionally, I encourage one or anther of my business-y cohorts to read what Jake or other anti-vaxxers/ woo-meisters wrote and usually, his material is greeted with “WTF” or ” Seriously, this is a graduate student?” He has provided much merriment amongst my retinue.

Having read this article and the very shocking one about the death of Alex Spourdalakis it seems to me that non-Thinking Moms see autism as something akin to demonic possession requiring a priest to prescribe the exact ritual that will ‘cure’ their child. I can understand desperation in a difficult position with a poorly understood condition but it doesn’t excuse the ‘treatments’ that they put their children through.

Actually, there is a genetic disease called ‘glutathione synthetase deficiency’, with mild to severe forms

Yeah, I did have the sense to double-check, but as you observe, it has no bearing on the GSH/MTHFR/methylation/detoxification/epigenetics/mitochondrial concept-salad that is all the rage among the antivaccine crank brigade.

The hospital did test for PANDAS (checking STREP levels) but since the boy had had a sinus infection and been on antibiotics (with no PROBIOTICS prescribed), it looks like his gut bacteria could not handle this live virus vaccine [varicella].

There are medical tests and treatments for him BUT the docs and hospitals have dismissed this as a vaccine injury and instead have told the family that he needs talk therapy for the anxiety and he coincidentally got Tourettes.

Bullsh!t! He is only 8 years old.

Is she under the impression that Tourette’s is mainly diagnosed in adults or something? I confess until not knowing much about it myself until recently, when I was at a party and made some joke involving Tourette’s, only to have one of my colleagues tell me that he had Tourette’s.

“Oh. Really?” (Did I ever feel like a jerk!)
“Yeah, I mostly grew out of it.”

Yeah, I did have the sense to double-check, but as you observe, it has no bearing on the GSH/MTHFR/methylation/detoxification/epigenetics/mitochondrial concept-salad that is all the rage among the antivaccine crank brigade.

The mention of Tourette’s reminded me of this article by Oliver Sacks, about a surgeon (and pilot) with Tourette’s. It’s an interesting piece that shattered a lot of my misconceptions about the condition.

“I have no idea how anyone came to the conclusion that “parasite protocol” in this context had to do beans with helminths.”

Sorry, since no one bothered to define what they mean by “parasite protocol”, the point was left open. However, it seems that everyone is simply enjoying their self-righteous blathering, so there’s obviously no point in getting involved here.

Gadam: “Sorry, since no one bothered to define what they mean by “parasite protocol”, the point was left open.”

Perhaps you should have gone and asked the “Thinking Mom Revolution” bloggers yourself. Or you could have just looked it up.

Usually it helps that before commenting on a blog for the first time that you lurk and get to know the culture, and a bit of the vocabulary before barging in with inflammatory comments like: “It’s good to see that everyone is so sure about the subjects they’re making fun of.” Because that was not the type of “parasites” being discussed.

So, you think that ridicule is the best way to educate? If you don’t think these people can be educated, then you’re just engaging in self-indulgent bullshit. There is no “rightful” mocking.

Spare me the faux indignation. There is no educating abusive parents who convince themselves shoving bleach up their autistic children’s rectums will cure-what-ails-them or mixing up a batch of poo to shove down their gullets will “fix their guts”. Go ahead and give some pointers on how to “educate” these arrogantly ignorant people but please put them to the test first and try to speak to them yourself. Or perhaps maybe you’re one of them.

Personally, I think both MMS and helminthic therapy indicate the difference between pseudomedicine and “real” medicine is somewhat complicated; for MMS, some years ago there was some talk about using sodium chlorite against ALS,

one theory was it involved modulation of the immune system, and for helminthic therapy, as mentioned there is some research about it in autoimmune diseases. And I’m somewhat divided between the need for regulation of new therapies and the right to do to your body what you want.

Where the latter shows one big difference, it’s not some libertarians trying it out on themselves, it’s people trying it out on their children.

I’m not that sure having a plausible MOA is such a good differentiator between pseudomedicine and medicine, there are quite a few medications around that were developed on wrong assumptions, but worked wonders for some other reasons. Serendipity is quite a thing in the life sciences.

A much better indicator is the attitude towards side effects, quite a few of pseudomedicine seems to run on some kind of magical thinking, e.g. “if it doesn’t hurt it doesn’t help”, which might explain things like the various bleach protocols. Where the experimental medicinal use of sodium chlorite tried to minimize said side effects in immunomodulation, and “real” medicine uses more selective agents for real parasites. And real helmintic therapy tried to use parasite that were less infective. Though I think we might also find some vestiges of said magical thinking in real medicine, “no effect without side effects” is usually sensible, but one could take it too far, and there was a time when people thought antipsychotics only worked when patients already showed some motor effects.

And last but not least, in “real” medicine, or at least evidence-based medicine, we try to test our interventions; not so much in pseudomedicine. Yes, I know this one is quite tricky with some “traditional” treatments. In this two cases, well, sodium chlorite didn’t play that well in ALS; as for worm eggs, it seems somewhat complicated, they might help in some, but not in all autoimmune diseases.

To cut a long story short, I guess we shouldn’t be mad at TMR for using sodium chlorite or worm eggs, but for the way they do it, e.g.

c) persisting after proven wrong (though we get into issues with falsification here)

As for autism and the immune system, hm, anecdotal evidence might indicate some interaction between personality and atopic diseases, but I neither know of any research, and I guess cause and effect might be difficult to disentangle. If the hygiene hypothesis is correct, it might just mean introverts don’t go out and get infected that much. Or a cytokine biochemistry prone to allegies in the immune system is also prone to develop autism in the CNS, e.g. pleiotropy. But of course, there are also indications the immune system and the CNS talk to each other.

I’m aware of it. Let’s just say it doesn’t support what quacks like Mark and David Geier think it supports, and it doesn’t support many of the “biomedical” interventions for autism designed around it. But it sure sounds impressive to the people the quacks are selling their wares to!

I’ve always tought that the could be a genetic component to auto immune diseases. Silly me its really due to having a vaccine!!!!!
But seriously, the TMR should be charged with cruelty for giving vulnerable chidren enemas up their derriers not to mention iron chelation therapy.
There seems to be a lot more children with Autism than previously as it is diagnosed far earlier than ever before. In the earlier C20th these chidren where put into homes for the insane and/or retarded. And those chidren on the upper
autism spectrum disorder where known as idiot savants. So those chidren never had a decent education. Autis Spectrum Disorder is a genetic disorder and not caused by vaccines. There is no “cure” as such, so please treat these children with the respect they diserve.

Alright I think I’ve cleaned up the order of events concerning The Rev and her writing- I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone so I put I the hard time re-reading this stuff..

I had the impression that she was very active at TMR, AoA, AIM, the Canary Party, facebook etc then got especially involved ‘advocating’ for Alex and later pulled back. After checking, I see that I was generally right with some qualifications.
( Isn’t memory incredible and worthy of study?)

-First of all, I wasn’t able to find her archived dreck at TMR because the Blogs by Author didn’t scroll down far enough BUT I found them instead at About TMR/ ‘getting personal’.
– I wasn’t able to find the articles about Alex because they were at AoA . ( List of contributors/ LJ Goes)

I’ll create a timeline- if case anyone wants to read her posts first hand:
-she wrote frequently for TMR since its inception Feb 2012.
-in Dec 2012, she wrote several posts about Alex’s hospital ordeal @ AoA which continued until the end of March 2013.
-At the same time she wrote about other issues @ TMR
– in early May 2013, she wrote a long, convoluted, nearly Gamondesian epic at TMR ( My Two Dreams) which details her symbolic passage from Activist to Parent and ends with her taking her leave of absence to ‘recover’ her son.
( this is what I clearly recalled but couldn’t find)

Alex died in early June 2013.

She wrote sporadically despite her farewell concert for both sites. Nothing about the late Alex though.

About the same time that Alex was ill and died, her son had various problems which she addressed with dietary regimes and Dr Krigsman. ( Wasn’t he also the GI specialist who saw Alex prior to his death for endoscopy?)

There are loads of other odd events, descriptions, ideas and self-promotion within her collected works but I’ll leave that to a warrior mom aficionado- which I certainly am not.

1. Since 2005 (and even before that), there have been no deaths in the U.S. from measles, but there have been 86 deaths from MMR vaccine – 68 of them in children under 3 years old. And there were nearly 2,000 disabled.

2. In countries which use BCG vaccinations against tuberculosis, the incidence of Type I diabetes in children under 14 is nearly double. (“Infectious Disease in Clinical Practice” no. 6 pages 449-454, 1997)

3. As reported in Lancet in 1995, inflammatory bowel disease (i.e. Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis) is 13 times more prevalent in persons vaccinated for measles.

4. In a nested case-control study within the General Practice Research Database (GPRD) in the United Kingdom, patients who had a first MS (Multiple Sclerosis) diagnosis recorded were compared with controls. The authors concluded that immunization with the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine is associated with a threefold increased risk of developing MS (Hernan et al., 2004). No increased risk of MS was associated with other vaccines, which included tetanus and influenza vaccinations.

5. In 1982 William Torch, a prolific researcher and publisher on Neurologic topics, presented a paper (later published) at the American Academy of Neurology reviewing SIDS deaths. He reported that in 100 consecutive cases, 70 percent of SIDS deaths occurred within three weeks of pertussis vaccination. In very convincing confirmation, a Japanese prefecture stopped vaccinating after associating SIDS with the pertussis vaccine. It is worth reading the entire description from Viera Scheibner, PhD:

In 1975, about 37 Crib Sudden Deaths were linked to vaccination in Japan. Doctors in one prefecture boycotted vaccinations, and refused to vaccinate. The Japanese government paid attention and stopped vaccinating children below the age of 2 years. When immunization was delayed until a child was 24 months of age, Sudden Infant Death cases and claims for vaccine related deaths disappeared. Japan zoomed from a high 17th place in infant mortality rate to the lowest infant mortality rate in the world when they stopped vaccinating. Japan didn’t vaccinate any children below the age of 2 years between 1975 and 1988, for 13 years. But then in 1988, Japanese parents were given the choice to start vaccinating anywhere between 3 months and 48 months. The Ministry study group studied 2,720 SIDS cases occurring between 1980 and 1992 and they established that their very low SIDS rate quadrupled.

6. A mail survey was done of 635 children in the Netherlands in 2004. German measles and whooping cough (pertussis) were twice as common in unvaccinated children. However, throat inflammations, ear infections, rheumatologic complaints, seizures and febrile convulsions were much more common in the vaccinated group. Aggressive behavioral episodes were eight times more frequent in vaccinated children, and sleep disordered more often. Tonsils were removed in 33 percent of children who had been vaccinated vs. 7.3 percent unvaccinated.

7. In 1947, the first reports of brain inflammation and chronic brain damage, including death, after pertussis vaccination began to be published (Brody, 1947; Byers and Moll, 1948, Low, 1955, Berg, 1958; Strom, 1960, 1967; Dick, 1967, 1974; Kuhlenkampff, 1974; Stewart, 1977, 1979). But it took more than 40 years of collective evidence before academic medicine decided it was true –1981 National Childhood Encephalopathy Study (NCES) and in 1991 and 1994 by the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences.

In 1991, after reviewing vaccine safety, the Institute of Medicine admitted, “In the course of its review, the committee encountered many gaps and limitations in knowledge bearing directly or indirectly on the safety of vaccines. These include inadequate understanding of the biologic mechanisms underlying adverse events following natural infection or immunization, insufficient or inconsistent information from case reports and case series, inadequate size or length of followup of many population based epidemiologic studies [and] few experimental studies published in relation to the number of epidemiologic studies published.”

Alex WAS KILLED in early June 2013.
She wrote sporadically despite her farewell concert for both sites. Nothing about the late Alex though.
About the same time that Alex was ill and WAS KILLED, her son had various problems….

Especially, in the U.S., the prevalence of autism became
endemic with an increase of about 5 in 10,000 to 60
in 10,000 after three additional thimerosal-containing
vaccines were introduced for newborns in the early
1990s, whereas in most other countries with a much
lower autism prevalence, like Germany or Denmark,
thimerosal in vaccines was reduced at the same time. In
California, the autism rate increased by 634% between
1987 and 2002, which cannot be attributed to shifts in
the interpretation of diagnostic criteria, migration or
improved diagnostic accuracies [3,4,9]. Other developmental
and behavioural disorders like attention deficit
disorders (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity
disorders (ADHD) have also increased up to 1 out of
every 6 children in the U.S. [10,11]. It should be noted
that in the 1990s, newborns until age of 6 months were
regularly exposed to a cumulative thimerosal dose of
187,5 µg [12].

Against this background it
is interesting to note that several scientists from the
FDA, NIH, and CDC may have been influenced by
vaccine manufacturers or dental boards [15, 20–24].
Despite this information, the Institute of Medicine of
the U.S. concluded recently that there is no relationship
between thimerosal and autism, and that no further
studies should be conducted to evaluate the relationship
between thimerosal and autism [25]. This was done in
spite of several biological studies reporting thimerosal
to have toxic properties that made it a major suspect for
the recent autism epidemic. There were no biological
studies presented that did not show major toxic effects
of thimerosal. Thus, it is pertinent to question why the
CDC committee suggested no further research and
emphasize the importance of carefully paying attention
to published and unpublished data and note pertinent
conflicts of interest.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Another recent study performed by Madsen et al.
[74] reported Danish autism rates of 6 per 10,000
for children born in the 1990s. These Danish rates
are very low in the 1990s compared to the U.S. [12].
Madsen et al. [69] report also inpatient rates for the
pre-1993 “psychosis proto-infantilis” at well below 1
per 10,000. This low rate would contradict the single
published survey of autism rates from Denmark,
which indicated an autism rate of over 4 per 10,000
as far back as the 1950s [75].
Additional confounders were present in the U.S.
with high prevalence of autism that were not present
in Denmark: Between 1970–92, the only childhood
vaccine given in Denmark until 5 months of age
was the monovalent pertussis vaccine. In the United
States, children were exposed to multiple doses of
diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, hepatitis B and
haemophilus influenza B (Hib) vaccines before five
months of age in the 1990s. Additionally, Denmark
did not administer thimerosal-containing Rho-D
immunoglobulin during pregnancy, which may
increase the risk for the development of autism [17].

The vaccine schedule for children
aged 5 and under has nearly tripled in 25 years. In 1983,
the Centers for Disease Control recommended 10
vaccines for this age group. Today, the
recommendation is 36 vaccines.

The United States mandates the most vaccines
in the Western world, double the average of the 30
countries studied. All countries with lower vaccine
mandates have better under 5 mortality rates and many
have materially lower autism rates.

AUTISM PREVALENCE in the United States has soared. In 1970, Treffert et. al. published the first known autism prevalence study in the United States, Epidemiology of Infantile Autism, with an autism prevalence rate of less than 1 per 10,000. In 1987, Burd et. al. published a study, A prevalence study of pervasive developmental disorders in North Dakota, showing an autism rate of 3.3 per 10,000. In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network released data showing that prevalence of autism had grown to 66 per 10,000 or 1 in 150, an increase of more than 6,000% from the 1970 study.

This study appears to lend credibility to the theory that the U.S. vaccine schedule is linked to the U.S. epidemic of autism, particularly when compared to the published autism rates of other countries. Urgent additional study is required.

The United States has a higher infant mortality rate than any of the other 27 wealthy countries, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control. A baby born in the U.S. is nearly three times as likely to die during her first year of life as one born in Finland or Japan. That same American baby is about twice as likely to die in her first year as a Spanish or Korean one.
Despite healthcare spending levels that are significantly higher than any other country in the world, a baby born in the U.S. is less likely to see his first birthday than one born in Hungary, Poland or Slovakia. Or in Belarus. Or in Cuba, for that matter.And any effort to dispute this gets the PR and private investigator treatment, such as is described in ”Bad Pharma.”

There is a connection to both of your comments.There has been a distinct metabolic/mitochondrial model of autism and comorbid medical problems that has been taking shape in recent years.One that involves unique defects in mitochondrial dysfunction or disease,and coexisting defects of folate,redox,and tetrahydrobiopterin metabolism.This is a congenital syndrome or complex that was not known to exist until a few years ago,and has nothing to do with vaccines in its cause.I have spent the last few years getting diagnosed with this condition.I am in my 50s.I was diagnosed as a child with verbal,but otherwise low functioning,autism.I struggled for decades with many weird and serious illnesses no doctor could explain.I have nearly died a couple of times from unexplained heart and other organ failure that were deemed idiopathic at the time,but I now know were metabolic in nature.Treating these metabolic conditions has had a dramatic result of controlling my autism and other brain related problems,but I still have many very serious medical issues.Especially mitochondrial.That’s the thing about inborn errors of metabolism.Once identified they can be treated,no matter how old you are.

I grew up during a time when the treatment of disabled people was just as Harobed describes.My mother was unique in that she refused to put me in an institution or any other residential treatment center.I lived with my mother until she died.Which was why I was eventually able to find a doctor that was willing to do the initial metabolic tests that led to my diagnosis.

It was very difficult to get to see the metabolic specialists I see.Not to mention very awkward.I had to provide an incredible amount of documentation,and jump through all sorts of hoops.This included getting reevaluated for autism,which was done before I had any metabolic tests or treatment.At the end of the evaluation,papers were presented for my mother to sign to put me in a group home,as it was not felt I could care for myself on any meaningful level.

And then there was the problem of getting into a hospital and research program that was designed for children.But I was able to do it.

It can’t be stated enough,that a big reason you do not see other autistic adults like me,adults over thirty who have all these complex metabolic and mitochondrial disorders,is that most of them are either nonverbal,or have moderate to severe autism diagnoses.They are still in residential treatment centers of one sort or another,where they have no access to experimental and cutting edge tests and treatment.Had they not been,had other more seriously autistic adults been tested and treated for these disorders all along,the way we see autism today would be very different indeed.The antivaccine movement might never have gained the momentum it did.And if you know anything about antivaxers,you know every single disease is “vaccine damage” to them.It doesn’t matter what it is.They know nothing about medicine,or how the various complex systems of the body work.

1. Since 2005 (and even before that), there have been no deaths in the U.S. from measles,

Not true, as kitty has pointed out there have been at least 13 deaths from measles since 2009.

but there have been 86 deaths from MMR vaccine – 68 of them in children under 3 years old. And there were nearly 2,000 disabled.

Not true, there has never been a death confirmed or even likely to have been caused by MMR. Compensation from the Vaccine Court does not indicate that a death or disability was definitely caused by a vaccine injury.

2. In countries which use BCG vaccinations against tuberculosis, the incidence of Type I diabetes in children under 14 is nearly double. (“Infectious Disease in Clinical Practice” no. 6 pages 449-454, 1997)
No, that isn’t true either. BCG has been in routine use in the UK for decades yet the incidence of type 1 diabetes in under-14-year-olds is almost identical in the two countries.

3. As reported in Lancet in 1995, inflammatory bowel disease (i.e. Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis) is 13 times more prevalent in persons vaccinated for measles.

4. In a nested case-control study within the General Practice Research Database (GPRD) in the United Kingdom, patients who had a first MS (Multiple Sclerosis) diagnosis recorded were compared with controls. The authors concluded that immunization with the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine is associated with a threefold increased risk of developing MS (Hernan et al., 2004). No increased risk of MS was associated with other vaccines, which included tetanus and influenza vaccinations.

That is the study that compared autism rates before hepatitis B vaccination was introduced and after, finding that autism diagnoses had increased, just as organic food sales had also increased. Autism incidence increased over the same period by almost exactly the same amount in the UK where hepatitis B vaccination is not on the routine schedule, so it can’t be the vaccine.

5. In 1982 William Torch, a prolific researcher and publisher on Neurologic topics, presented a paper (later published) at the American Academy of Neurology reviewing SIDS deaths. He reported that in 100 consecutive cases, 70 percent of SIDS deaths occurred within three weeks of pertussis vaccination. In very convincing confirmation, a Japanese prefecture stopped vaccinating after associating SIDS with the pertussis vaccine. It is worth reading the entire description from Viera Scheibner, PhD:

In 1975, about 37 Crib Sudden Deaths were linked to vaccination in Japan. Doctors in one prefecture boycotted vaccinations, and refused to vaccinate. The Japanese government paid attention and stopped vaccinating children below the age of 2 years. When immunization was delayed until a child was 24 months of age, Sudden Infant Death cases and claims for vaccine related deaths disappeared. Japan zoomed from a high 17th place in infant mortality rate to the lowest infant mortality rate in the world when they stopped vaccinating. Japan didn’t vaccinate any children below the age of 2 years between 1975 and 1988, for 13 years. But then in 1988, Japanese parents were given the choice to start vaccinating anywhere between 3 months and 48 months. The Ministry study group studied 2,720 SIDS cases occurring between 1980 and 1992 and they established that their very low SIDS rate quadrupled.

That’s incredible, literally. A look at the Tokyo census data for this period (1964-93) shows that SIDS actually increased after the change in vaccination age. This lie has been circulated by Scheibner for years, by people who are too lazy or dishonest to check the facts before passing them on.

6. A mail survey was done of 635 children in the Netherlands in 2004. German measles and whooping cough (pertussis) were twice as common in unvaccinated children. However, throat inflammations, ear infections, rheumatologic complaints, seizures and febrile convulsions were much more common in the vaccinated group. Aggressive behavioral episodes were eight times more frequent in vaccinated children, and sleep disordered more often. Tonsils were removed in 33 percent of children who had been vaccinated vs. 7.3 percent unvaccinated.

A self-reported telephone survey that found that people who don’t vaccinate their children don’t trust doctors and claim their children are healthier. What a surprise.

Mr. Wilcox: “The Japanese government paid attention and stopped vaccinating children below the age of 2 years. When immunization was delayed until a child was 24 months of age, Sudden Infant Death cases and claims for vaccine related deaths disappeared.”

I hate that lie. You cannot blame a vaccine if the child did not get it, but still dies. Often from pertussis.

The abstract starts with: “An antivaccine movement developed in Japan as a consequence of increasing numbers of adverse reactions to whole-cell pertussis vaccines in the mid-1970s. After two infants died within 24 h of the vaccination from 1974 to 1975, the Japanese government temporarily suspended vaccinations. Subsequently, the public and the government witnessed the re-emergence of whooping cough, with 41 deaths in 1979. This series of unfortunate events revealed to the public that the vaccine had, in fact, been beneficial.”

an analysis by Dr Jacob Puliyel is getting traction on anti-vax blogs/websites/FB that he has analysed GSK data and argued that child mortality is clustered around the time period 2 days following the hexavalent immunization, so could someone have a look at this and tell me the flaw in the analysis?http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/jacob.puliyel.1/comments/

Becca Stareyes: Do these ‘Thinking Moms’ actually talk to autistic people, or do they pathologize anything that’s not acceptably normal and introduce dubious to abusive cures?

I doubt that any of them have ever held a conversation with any autistic people, and that includes their children. (Talked at is different than talked to.)
As for your second point, yes, they do pathologize everything. I remember reading one of the earliest screeds, where one of the ‘moms’ (might’ve been Lisa Goes herself) wrote about how unhealthy her nonautistic kid’s classmates seemed to her, including a few kids with dark circles under their eyes- obviously suffering from a gluten allergy. I was amused, since I persistently had dark circles under my eyes as a kid. I was allergic to bedtime, not wheat.

It’s clear that the patient whose mother “has behaved, and proposes to behave, in a way which is not in [her son’s] best interests” could not have been among the children in the 1998 Lancet article, since “In March 1999 X was seen for the first time at the Royal Free Hospital’s Autism/IBD clinic” and “in or around January 2001, Dr Andrew Wakefield was involved in the care of X.”

Off topic, but this is billed at Salon as “Amy Schumer rips loony anti-vaxxer parents.”

Amy Schumer took aim at wacky anti-vaxxer parents in her most recent sketch “Doggy Daycare” from Tuesday’s episode of “Inside Amy Schumer.” The sketch cleverly uses dogs as stand-ins for children to underscore the insanity of this parenting tactic. It also makes some not-so-tacit allusions to noted anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy and a disease called “pawtism.” Which sounds a lot like — oh, you guys got it.

I’ve watched a few of the AutismOne 2015 videos
( now available at their site/ includes Rivera -btw- last I looked) –
so far, I’ve seen TMs, Andy and Heckenlively- all quite horrible.

On the TMs’ Writing Workshop, the Prof informs us that they’re trying for bigger numbers in order to precipitate paradigm shift and want to attract people on the fence, teens, minorities AND the Neurodiversity crowd.

On the “How Not to Die” tape, The Rev illustrates her fabled *ne plus ultra* of smarmy self-righteousness.

And right, they do go on about the proverbial dark circles
( which are a “red flag”- their latest series of informational posts)
.
I always thought I had them because I haven’t much pigment or fat around my eyes.( Easy to fix- see Rimmel.com)

What http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/80/6/1611.full tells me is that we have a way to screen vulnerable children before injecting them with toxic metals. Jill James ultimately used 75 children in each group and the results were the same: 100% of the autistic kids and 0% of the normal kids had this biochemical anomaly.

What http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/80/6/1611.full tells me is that we have a way to screen vulnerable children before injecting them with toxic metals. Jill James ultimately used 75 children in each group and the results were the same: 100% of the autistic kids and 0% of the normal kids had this biochemical anomaly.

Cripes I wish people could read and understand their own citations before trotting them out as some kind of panacea for “testing vulnerable children”. The study authors didn’t even control for diet for crying out loud, kind of a big deal when looking at the biomarkers they did FFS. So tell me again what value this has for “vulnerable children”?

On the TMs’ Writing Workshop, the Prof informs us that they’re trying for bigger numbers in order to precipitate paradigm shift and want to attract people on the fence, teens, minorities AND the Neurodiversity crowd.

Err, I’m somewhat puzzled by the inclusion of Neurodiversity, given that the Neurodiversity people I’ve been involved with usually think autism, ADHD and like are somewhat genetically determined, sometimes adaptive phenotypes, not that much of a disease to be “cured”.

An analogy would be a “mandatory cochlea implant and no sign language to be allowed” group trying to reach out to some “deaf and pround” groups…

It’s hard to find the TM videos on the AO site – both were on Friday but that listing is mixed up ( as are the TMs) I suppose- I got the Recovery one by chance alone:
it might be easier to go directly to the TMR facebook page and move backwards in time until the 26th and 22nd of May to get those two videos- respectively, Parents’ Recovery Panel ( 2 hrs) and “How Not to Die” – however, MacNeil- one of my faves- doesn’t appear.

I imagine that you’ll need more than a cocktail or three- have any opiates? Only joking- although they are painful to watch but often hilarious as well.

Briefly I’ve never seen as much posturing that didn’t include models, designers and runways.

Frankly, I don’t know how they can address ND folk when their entire objective is to b!tch about their children’s ASDs and try to fix them so as to conform to their own needs.
But that’s what she says.

To me personally, the standouts- not in a good way- are The Rev ( Lisa Goes) in How Not to Die and the Prof in the Recovery one.

” The study authors didn’t even control for diet for crying out loud”
No and they didn’t control for the phase of the moon either. The point is that 100% of the autistic kids had an impaired ability to deal with free radicals, which are created by mercury and aluminum and cause neurological damage. So is it too much of a stretch to screen kids for this condition before injecting them with mercury and aluminum?

Trottelreiner: “Err, I’m somewhat puzzled by the inclusion of Neurodiversity, given that the Neurodiversity people I’ve been involved with usually think autism, ADHD and like are somewhat genetically determined, sometimes adaptive phenotypes, not that much of a disease to be “cured”.”

They think they’ll attract more self-haters like Jake.

DW: Eh, I’m a lightweight, so I imagine two cocktails will be enough to get me good and drunk.

Despite my ancestry**, I can get rather blitzed on two drinks as well but who’s counting.

I think that they’re trying very hard to talk out of both sides of their mouths simultaneously to increase readership and sell books/ e-conferences The Prof ( yeah right, I’m sure she has tenure) instructs them to not insult, be nice, be careful accusing etc.on the Writing crapfest.

No and they didn’t control for the phase of the moon either. The point is that 100% of the autistic kids had an impaired ability to deal with free radicals, which are created by mercury and aluminum and cause neurological damage. So is it too much of a stretch to screen kids for this condition before injecting them with mercury and aluminum?

When you trot out a study as proof of something, you make sure it actually supports what you claim. Since diet is absolutely contingent upon what they were measuring, controlling and accounting for dietary differences is pivotal. So no, these children did not have impaired ability to “deal with” mercury and aluminium and no, “screening” them for a non-existent malady is pointless.

The point is that 100% of the autistic kids had an impaired ability to deal with free radicals, which are created by mercury and aluminum and cause neurological damage. So is it too much of a stretch to screen kids for this condition before injecting them with mercury and aluminum?

Do you know what creates so many more free radicals that even if you got a vaccine every day for the rest of your life it would still be entirely irrelevant in comparison? Oxygen.

So by your logic, children should be tested to see if they should be allowed to breathe.

“When you trot out a study as proof of something, you make sure it actually supports what you claim. Since diet is absolutely contingent upon what they were measuring, controlling and accounting for dietary differences is pivotal.”

They weren’t asking that question. They were asking whether this anomaly is predictive of acquiring autism. If the anomaly was an independent variable you would have seen no correlation with autism. Instead the concordance is 100% in a population of 150 kids. We also have a plausible mechanism (inability to neutralize free radicals). You could argue that maybe autism created the anomaly and not vice-versa and that’s a possibility. Someone needs to do that research. But in the meantime it’s reckless to subject such kids to mercury and aluminum injections, at least until their ability to detoxify is bolstered.

Where did you explain how anything you’re pointing at “creates free radicals”?

I can only (confidently) assume that if I expended the time to go over actual mercury toxicology, for example, the collision with your cut-and-paste, naked-link-dropping head would be perfectly elastic.

ournal of clinical nutrition, the lancet, the NEJM … what sources would befit your superior intelligence?

What good are they if you don’t understand them and using them as a bludgeon? I just freakin love walking amateurs’ through their own citations. Read the intro of this: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/80/6/1611.full as in the methionine cycle and now tell me how this:

A quantifiable diet questionnaire was not administered as part of this study; thus, specific dietary differences within and between groups cannot be determined.

is not a huge problem? Your other contentions about mercury, aluminium and free-radicals are equally flaccid.

And another red-flag with this study is the selection criteria as in where in Hades is it? How were these children recruited? No attempt at matching. And here you are demanding expensive testing for things you don’t even have a cursory understanding of. Damn neophytes.

No, it’s not a problem at all. It has nothing to do with the question being asked.

Wrong Skippy, it has everything to do with the testing parameters. The children’s nutrition will have a profound effect on the examined biomarkers.

You’re being dense.

So just banging out some groups of children without explanation of how they came to be studied nor how controls were selected is acceptable to you? No wonder you curebie gits have such a low bar of evidence when it comes to what you want to hear.

Welp, you could have said at the start that your numbers and claims are [personal communication] rather than coming from the study you cited.
You had your chance to interest me, but when your claims are purportedly based on one paper and then it turns out that actually you’re relying on a different back-channel source, then you’re just another loon on the Intertube.

” The study authors didn’t even control for diet for crying out loud”
No and they didn’t control for the phase of the moon either.

OK, let’s repeat it the slow way…

Free radicals are usually captured by some other molecules, though if that is necessarily a good thing is anther question, remember the fun we had with mortality in smokers on vitamin E?

The source of these molecules is quite often food, and there are marked differences between different food.

Autism Spectrum Disorders are quite often tied with sensory problems,e.g. hypersensitivity to certain colors, sounds, smells or tastes. We will leave the question if this is a lower threshold in perception (e.g. “vulcan hearing”) or just a heightened sensitivity (e.g. the fun of the hangover) unexplored.

Hypersensitivity with smelling and tasting is quite likely to influence diet; even besides this, ASDs are notorious for mannerisms, e.g. “it has to be my favourite food”. On another level, some parents try diets to alleviate symptoms, e.g. the Feingold diet in ADHD.

Oh, and as mentioned diet might influence ability to cope with free radicals.

So, sorry to say, but without controlling for diet, diminuished capabilities for free radical capture in autistics is about as indicative as “malvaria” as a diagnostic tool for schizophrenia:

Other metals might directly create free radicals. Please note that AFAIK aluminium doesn’t seem to be part of either group.

Also note quite a lot of this research is with methylmercury, which likely differs somewhat from thiomersal. Also note “developing neurons” might not mean “neurons in children”, but “neurons in embryos”. And that there is a dosage-response curve, with low dosages having little to no effect.

They weren’t asking that question. They were asking whether this anomaly is predictive of acquiring autism.

What anomaly? None of these results look particularly abnormal to me (I spent a couple of decades working in clinical biochemistry). Any variations could be due to many different factors, including diet, as Science Mom pointed out.

If the anomaly was an independent variable you would have seen no correlation with autism.

Not necessarily, we see correlations between independent variables all the time, they are called confounders. A lack of correlation suggests a lack of association, not vice versa.

Instead the concordance is 100% in a population of 150 kids.

Concordance of what? I see more or less overlapping values in these 53 children with different average values, as you would expect in two small subgroups from chance. Where did you get 150 from? I’m wondering if I’m discussing the wrong paper now.

We also have a plausible mechanism (inability to neutralize free radicals).

Even if these results suggested problems neutralizing free radicals, which they don’t (lower levels do not necessarily mean dysfunction), how is this a plausible mechanism? How specifically does an inability to neutralize free radicals result in autism?

You could argue that maybe autism created the anomaly and not vice-versa and that’s a possibility. Someone needs to do that research.

I see no anomaly. Variations within the reference range are not anomalies. I do agree that a better controlled study might be interesting.

But in the meantime it’s reckless to subject such kids to mercury and aluminum injections, at least until their ability to detoxify is bolstered.

Even if these children did have problems metabolizing mercury and aluminum, which this study does not suggest in the slightest, the amounts of these substances in vaccines is far too small to cause any problems. The minuscule amounts of aluminum and ethylmercury from metabolized vaccines are easily excreted in feces and urine, just as the larger quantities of mercury and aluminum we absorb from air, water and food are excreted.

BTW, if you think free radicals cause autism, you might consider how vaccination dramatically reduces free radical exposure – a full-blown measles infection generates far more oxidative stress than an MMR shot, for example. Wouldn’t we have expected to see far more autism in the pre-vaccine era if that were the case?

Concordance of what? I see more or less overlapping values in these 53 children with different average values, as you would expect in two small subgroups from chance. Where did you get 150 from? I’m wondering if I’m discussing the wrong paper now.

I learned of the “Thinking Moms” a couple of years ago. My husband had been in a dreadful accident, and I changed my Facebook privacy settings to include “friends of friends” so that my updates on his medical condition could be seen by his circle of friends – I was just too overwhelmed by the daily details of life at that point to make individual posts/texts/phone calls to notify everyone. After the first excitement, I forgot to change back to “only my friends.”

A couple of months after the car accident, I posted something innocuous about the baby getting her regular vaccines. That’s when a friend-of-a-friend, “Blaze” from TMR, began haranguing me about “poisoning” my child. I was a bit nonplussed, but just ignored the silliness. A few months later, a similar post on my Facebook elicited a similar response from “Blaze”/Kim. I was in a mood, so I engaged the crazy. (I know better than to feed trolls, but my curiosity was piqued – why would some woman who graduated from my high school two years ahead of me, someone I wouldn’t know if I ran into her at the grocery store, get so hot and bothered because I had the audacity to vaccinate my own child, just as I had done for her five older siblings?)

Oh, my! Big mistake! Never mind the fact that mountains of research backed up my decision, never mind that all of my children are blessedly healthy, never mind the fact that the medical decisions I make for my kids are pretty reasonable and well within the parameters of customary and safe practice, I was wrong, wrong, wrong! I was attacked for “abusing” my poor, helpless little baby. That’s when I began perusing Kim’s social media. Imagine my horror at discovering that her autistic son had been subjected to downright abusive quack treatments – from bleach enemas to chelation “therapy,” things I wouldn’t do to my worst enemy, much less a beloved child!

Mind you, vaccination was one of those things that I never, ever had doubts about – I’ve heard stories from my late grandmother-in-law, who practiced medicine in rural Georgia from 1938 until 1976. Years later, Dr. Katherine was still haunted by the memory of the children who couldn’t be saved, who died or became seriously disabled from illnesses that we can now routinely prevent. But Kim knew better – her child was “taken” from her by Big Pharma and the Medical-Industrial Complex, and by God! she knew better than all of those doctors and researchers!

I read more and more about the Thinking Moms, and their approaches to their children’s autism, and their attacks on anyone who dared to question “Dr. Mom.” I discussed with a couple of on-line acquaintances, who had just published “Your Baby’s Best Shot,” and who had also been targeted by TMR for daring to diss AoA and TMR and Wakefield and all of the associated silliness. And I concluded, based on my own research? Them women be crazy!

My take on TMR, based largely on what I know of “Blaze”: Mostly privileged women whose entitlement somehow leads them to believe that they’ve somehow been robbed of the perfect child to accessorize their nice homes, nice cars, and regular manicures. Since they can’t brag about their autistic children’s accomplishments, they brag about their own exceptional efforts to “recover” that child they were entitled to. Nothing revolutionary, no thinking involved, and I’m not entirely sure that most of these loons deserve the title “Mom” (or “Dad”) except in the purely biological sense.

I have two close friends with autistic sons – one of the boys is profoundly disabled, the other is making great strides and may one day be able to function independently. These friends do revolutionary things: they seek therapies and educational opportunities and social opportunities to help their sons integrate as much as possible and reach their fullest potential, and they accept and love their sons as individuals – not as some jumble of medical problems that must be healed in order that mom may love the person they were “supposed to be.”

What do you know!
I’ve been watching the TMs’ videos from Autism One:
Blaze is featured prominently in at least one ( How Not to Die IIRC/ I also saw the Recovery Panel, Writing Workshop and IEP meeting). She is quite the outspoken Southern Belle!

It disturbs me that they advise parents based upon their spurious educations at the University of G–gle and McCarthy Tech. Unfortunately, two of them who do have relevant training in psychology and social work don’t give exactly SB advice either ( opposing meds in general, buying into woo).

Although TMR may partially serve its function as a support group for distressed women, it goes far beyond by suggesting medical and psychological intervention for ASD as well as providing role models that eschew realistic solutions to problems parents of kids with ASDs encounter.

After reading MTR since its inception, I have a similar take on them as you. Watching them up close by video, I did learn that several of them have husbands who “work all the time”.
I have characterised TMR as ‘group therapy gone wrong’ and I do feel however that some of them could benefit from counselling from a trained person from outside their own orbit of fallacies. I doubt that they would consider it although one did admit she goes to therapy.

You might be entertained to watch them on video. See Autism One 2015 videos.

I’ve tried to watch the videos, but I’m dealing with a disabled husband, four kids still at home (plus a spare teenager, long story,) three dogs, etc. I just don’t have the time or patience to listen to the self-absorbed blather.

If TMR were simply a support group? I’d be all for it. Having a disabled child can certainly be overwhelming, and moral support is important, as is having someone to talk to who can relate to your struggles. Instead, it seems to function as an echo chamber, and no one seems to notice as the echos get weirder and weirder – that reasonable people don’t recommend bleach enemas and chelation and the various other whackadoodle “therapies” these folks are subjecting their defenseless children to. It’s like some terrible game of “telephone,” where the originator said “I use bleach to clean the kitchen counter” and the final player heard “I bleach my kid’s bum to teach him to count.” Horrifying.

Now what would the odds be of that happening before 1986? (Roll out year of the new vaccine schedule, containing more and earlier vaccines than ever before. This is also the year Big Pharma was no longer legally liable for vaccine adverse events.)

Activists demand action amid soaring autism rates
Posted on April 3, 2012
“Blaxill points to critical flaws in the CDC’s surveillance. Critically, the CDC only goes back to the 1992 birth cohort in their reporting. The clear inflection point, he says, occurred in 1988. Tracing numbers prior to 1988, he says, would give us a better idea how low the numbers actually go prior to the explosion in rates. Perhaps the clearest example of this are the rates of autism in Brick Township, NJ, the location in the US where autism rates were first observed to be growing at an extremely alarming rate. Autism rates in 1988-1989 in Brick were reported to be zero. In four years, the rate of autism there had skyrocketed to one in 128. The ADDM numbers reported last Friday have excluded Ocean County, where Brick is located.”http://blog.chron.com/autisminthehouse/2012/04/activists-demand-action-amid-soaring-autism-rates/

“Even if these children did have problems metabolizing mercury and aluminum, which this study does not suggest in the slightest, the amounts of these substances in vaccines is far too small to cause any problems.”

In 1999, Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, Division of Epidemiology and Surveillance, CDC, reported “Increased risk of developmental neurologic impairment after high exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccine in first month of life…”
“Results: ….The relative risk of developing a neurologic development disorder was 1.8 (95% confidence intervals…) when comparing the highest exposure group at 1 month of age (cumulative dose greater than 25 micrograms) to the unexposed group. Within this group we also found an elevated risk for the following disorders: autism (RR 7.6…), non-organic sleep disorders (RR 5.0 …), and speech disorders (RR 2.1…).”

“No system is perfect and no medicine or vaccine can ever be guaranteed to be 100 percent free of possible side effects or adverse events, particularly when administered to millions of people. For these reasons, the Department, its constituent agencies (FDA, CDC, NIH, HRSA), the scientific community, and industry strive for continuous improvements in vaccine safety. Speaking for the Department and its agencies, we welcome all constructive input and criticism in this regard….”

“scientists who have dedicated large swaths of their lives to the rigorous study of conditions such as autism ”

The AUTISM EXPLOSION started in 1986-88, the former being the year a law was passed giving Big Pharma vaccine liability protection:

“On October 1, 1988, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (Public Law 99-660) created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). The VICP was established to ensure an adequate supply of vaccines, stabilize vaccine costs, and establish and maintain an accessible and efficient forum for individuals found to be injured by certain vaccines. The VICP is a no-fault alternative to the traditional tort system for resolving vaccine injury claims that provides compensation to people found to be injured by certain vaccines. The U. S. Court of Federal Claims decides who will be paid. Three Federal government offices have a role in the VICP:
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS);
the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ); and
the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (the Court).
The VICP is located in the HHS, Health Resources and Services Administration, Healthcare Systems Bureau, Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation.”http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/index.html
NEW VACCINES AND EARLIER ADMINISTRATION OF THEM STARTED IN 1986, yet in almost 30 YEARS they say, “I KNOW NOTHING!”

I’ve invested a cool $3,359,939,341.89 in, you guessed it, U.S. TREASURY BONDS! Yeah!
I did set aside a paltry $220,000,000.00 for poor vaccine injured saps. All in a month’s work: September 1, 2014 through September 30, 2014.ftp://ftp.publicdebt.treas.gov/dfi/tfmb/dfivi0914.pdf

@Toto, 225:
You talk about changed legislation, but legislation doesn’t directly influence incidence, there has to be some effector. And for that one, your timeframe is somewhat wrong; the MMR vaccine was first introduce in 1971, too early for the autism explosion, the second dose was introduced in 1989, too late for your explosion. You could argue that autism was only diagnosed after doctors felt safe from litigation, but would introduce a disconnect between incidence and diagnosis. Whatever interpretation you choose, it’s going to be complicated.

Which, incidentally, is a much easier explanation and would also somewhat fit with some teachers anecdotes; incidence of autism, ADHD and like combined: about 4%, comment of a teacher in the 80s when talking about your’s truly “with every 100 pupils, there are 3 or 4 that show up on the playground, no idea why”.

And in 1991 even though my son could not speak, he did not qualify as autistic under that criteria. Now twenty four years later he now has an diagnosis of Autism Level II under both DSM-IV and DSM-V.

He does test for normal intelligence, which means he does not qualify for Developmental Disabilities Administration services, but also since he could not speak at age three he also would not have been given the Asperger label under DSM-IV. (it does not exist in DSM-V).

Where I ask myself how they accounted for different confounding factors, e.g. children with multiple vaccinations having more interaction with medical services, which might see something is odd, or special needs children being supervised by some agency and getting more shots, or special needs children being more prone to injury an thus getting more tetanus shots (one vaccine containing thimerosal), or…

@Trottelreiner 229
The ENTIRE schedule is implicated. The ENTIRE vaccine schedule was different after 1986. The cumulative amount of mercury increased, and for the first time, infants could receive 25mg of it on the day of birth. No safety studies on the ENTIRE schedule had been done. The MMR is the last vaccine to be given in the schedule (12-15 mos.) and contains live virus. A mercury (or now, aluminum) compromised immune system (plus other factors) could easily set the stage for a new kind of encephalopathy triggered by the MMR. We now call it “autism”. The Vaccine Court awarded Hannah Polling $1 million for vaccine induced encephalopathy, ending in an autism diagnosis.

The Dr. Verstraeten statistics looked at children who had received the same full vaccine schedule, except for the HepB (25 mg thimerosal) missing from one co-hort. That VERY SMALL DIFFERENCE showed a Relative Risk of 7.6 for AUTISM. ANY RR OVER 1 IS SIGNIFICANT! This was from statistics recorded prior to 1999. You can see in the recorded minutes of an emergency meeting called by CDC head, Dr. Walter Orenstein, that a MAGIC WAND was used to make the inconvenient statistics go away.
Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information June 7-8, 2000 Simpsonwood Retreat Center Norcross, Georgiahttp://thinktwice.com/simpwood.pdf

Interestingly, after 2000, the CDC quietly recommended reducing the amount of mercury in vaccines. Interestingly, California BANNED Thimerosal in 2006:
“The new law, sponsored by Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, was aimed at reducing the risk of neurodevelopmental problems such as autism, which many parents believe can be traced to exposure to thimerosal, a substance used as a preservative in many vaccines.

Several large federal studies have shown no link between childhood vaccines and autism, but additional research is ongoing.

@Trottelreiner #233
“OTOH, 1987 saw the introduction of DSM-III-R, which quite changed diagnostic criteria for autism….Which, incidentally, is a much easier explanation and would also somewhat fit with some teachers anecdotes;”

CALIFORNIA DISAGREES WITH YOU:
“The Autism Epidemiology Study did not find evidence that the rise in autism cases can be attributed to artificial factors, such as loosening of the diagnostic criteria for autism; more misclassification of autism cases as mentally retarded in the past; or an increase in in-migration of children with autism to California. Without evidence for an artificial increase in autism cases, we conclude that some, if not all, of the observed increase represents a true increase in cases of autism in California, and the number of cases presenting to the Regional Center system is not an overestimation of the number of children with autism in California.”http://www.dds.ca.gov/Autism/docs/6conclusion.pdfhttp://www.dds.ca.gov/Autism/docs/6conclusion.pdf

@ #233
CDC DOCUMENTS THE BEGINNING OF THE AUTISM EXPLOSION: 1987! This is one year after the roll out of the new vaccine schedule (with increased thimerosal) and passage of a law protecting vaccine manufacturers from liability:

“Although autism was defined previously primarily as autistic disorder and thought to be rare, autism is now considered one of multiple ASDs (2,3). During the 1990s, the number of persons reported to be receiving services for ASDs increased substantially (4–9). In CALIFORNIA, the number of persons receiving services for AUTISM INCREASED APPROXIMATELY 300% during 1987–1998 and approximately 100% during 1998–2002 (4,5). After adjusting for changes in population size, prevalence for persons in the 1987–1994 birth cohorts receiving autism services in California increased from 0.6 to 1.5 per 1,000 population (6). In Minnesota, steady increases have been demonstrated in the prevalence of diagnosed autism among three birth cohorts (7); prevalence in children aged 8 years increased from 2.0 per 1,000 population in the 1997–1998 school year to 6.6 per 1,000 population in the 2001–2002 school year. Nationwide, the number of children receiving special education services for autism increased 500% from the 1991–1992 school year to the 1998–1999 school year (8). Data comparing the prevalence of autism with other disabilities for successive birth cohorts of school children indicated that among children aged 10 years, autism prevalence per 1,000 children increased from 0.5 in the 1984 birth cohort to 1.8 in the 1990 birth cohort; increases were greater in children aged 6 years, increasing from 0.5 in the 1986 birth cohort to 2.4 in the 1994 birth cohort (9).”http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5601a2.htm

“DUE TO advances in biotechnology and VACCINE SAFETY, the NUMBER OF routinely recommended VACCINES has been EXPANDED to control newly-preventable diseases, and the COMPOSITION of some vaccines has been CHANGED to provide the safest vaccines possible. The ADVISORY COMMITTEE on Immunization Practices (ACIP) CONTINUALLY makes NEW recommendations to the VACCINE SCHEDULE to further protect the health of our nation’s children. These recommendations for routine use of ADDITIONAL VACCINES to prevent disease RESULT IN INCREASED VACCINE purchase COSTS for the immunization program. The COST, using the CDC contract, of purchasing the vaccines to fully vaccinate a preschool child has INCREASED FROM approximately $130/CHILD IN 1990 TO approximately $394/CHILD IN 2001. For example, the cost of the NEW pneumococcal conjugate VACCINE is about equivalent to the TOTAL COMBINED COSTS of ALL other pediatric vaccines in the RECOMMENDED schedule.”
Statement of
Walter A. Orenstein, M.D.
Director
National Immunization Program,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
Department of Health and Human Services

The graphic on page 9 (or 11 in adobe page count) shows your whole “1987 explosion” actually started in 1981, so we can lay that one to rest.

Never mind this paper compares 1983-85 to 1993-95, and autism is usually diagnosed at 4 years or older, e.g. diagnosis was usually after 1987, after DSM-III-R, they specifically mentioned DSM-III-R and following broadened diagnostic criteria, and they used DSM-IV.

Also note that with this 4 years lag mentioned above, any change by the 1987 legislation would be seen in 1991 and later. Incidentally there was a fall in autism rates in 1991 according to this same graphic, and some other papers mentioned a flattening after 1991…

To cut a long story short, you mentioned bogus data, but also linked to the article disproving it.

The Dr. Verstraeten statistics looked at children who had received the same full vaccine schedule, except for the HepB (25 mg thimerosal) missing from one co-hort.

OK, let’s use another example. Though numbers are not as big as some might think, there are children with vitamin deficiency. We give supplements to those, but sometimes the damage is already done. Most children don’t have vitamin deficiencies and have no damages, they also usually don’t get supplement.

Now if we were to compare children who took supplements to those that didn’t, we’d have many children with the damage due to vitamin deficiency in the first group, which is somewhat smaller. We’d also have some children with said damage in the second group, but the whole group is much larger. Result: Incidence of damage due to vitamin deficiency is much higher in children getting supplements than in those that don’t, ergo vitamin supplements cause vitamin deficiency.

Hope you understand why “correlation isn’t causation” is that much of a mantra for some of us.

And as already mentioned, we can’t assume a priori the children who got more shots in the first month were the same in any other way. Most likely they weren’t, or they wouldn’t have got more shots in the first month.

BTW,

That VERY SMALL DIFFERENCE showed a Relative Risk of 7.6 for AUTISM. ANY RR OVER 1 IS SIGNIFICANT!

@Trottelreiner
The story behind the MIND report:
“Autism Epidemic
Responding to the concern of a Dad, whose healthy son became autistic following a series of DPT, Hib and MMR vaccinations, in 1998 the California Legislature decided to analyze the history of autism in the state. Rick Rollens, father of two, former Secretary of the California Senate, and co-founder of F.E.A.T. (Families for Early Autism Treatment — (http://www.feat.org) and the University of California-Davis M.I.N.D. Institute, persuaded the legislature to fund an investigation by the California Department of Developmental Services (DDS) into state autism statistics after he concluded his son, Russell, now 9, was not the victim of a rare disorder but one that had become quite common in children.

California Autism Rates Soar

Sure enough, in an April 1999 report (http://www.dds.ca.gov) DDS found a 273 percent increase between 1987 and 1998 in the numbers of new children entering the California developmental services system with a professional diagnosis of autism. The report concluded that “the number of persons with autism grew markedly faster than the number of persons with other developmental disabilities (cerebral palsy, epilepsy and mental retardation)” and “compared to characteristics of 11 years ago, the present population of persons with autism are younger (and) have a greater chance of exhibiting no or milder forms of mental retardation. . . .”

Although autism has been cited by public health officials and autism researchers to occur in 2 to 10 in 10,000 children nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control in a report released in April 2000 found the incidence of autism in Brick Township, New Jersey in 1998 was 1 in 150 children (the incidence in the Granite Bay, California public elementary school district is 1 in 132 children), which may be more reflective of the true rate of autism in the U.S. today. The Autism Society of America estimates that “more than one-half million people in the U.S. today have autism or some form of pervasive developmental disorder,” making autism one of the most common developmental disabilities. (http://www/autism-society.org)

After the California report documented the dramatic increases in autism in the past decade, the California legislature voted to appropriate one million dollars to the UC-Davis M.I.N.D. Institute to look for environmental and biological factors, including vaccine use, that could have contributed to this autism increase. At the same time, parents began to check autism statistics in other states.

Other States Report Similar Increases

The story is the same in other states. The 1998 Maryland Special Education Census Data revealed that the state experienced a 513 percent increase in autism between 1993 and 1998, while the general Maryland population from 1990 to 1998 increased just seven percent. A comparative analysis of the 16th and 20th Annual Reports to Congress on the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) conducted by Ray Gallup, President of Autism Autoimmunity Project (http://www.gti.net/truegrit) and father of Eric, who has vaccine-associated autism, showed increases of more than 300 percent in autistic children served under IDEA between 1992 and 1997 in the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma,

The graph definitely shows an AUTISM EXPLOSION after 1986.
Please post the yearly vaccine schedule for California from 1968 – 1975, and the year 1986. Please note any years the vaccine STOCKPILE was used in California and what vaccines were used. Also, please list any years that vaccine clinical trials were taking place in California, which vaccine, and how many participants. Thanks!

Sorry Trottee
#240
The CDC scientist used RELATIVE RISK. My statement stands. Otherwise, Dr. O wouldn’t have called an emergency meeting to “deal” with it- at a Methodist retreat center, no less.

“For technical reasons, some other measures are often used. The relative risk (RR) of a bad outcome in a group given intervention is a proportional measure estimating the size of the effect of a treatment compared with other interventions or no treatment at all. It is the proportion of bad outcomes in the intervention group divided by the proportion of bad outcomes in the control group. In this hypothetical case, the RR is 0.6 (12 per cent ÷ 20 per cent = 0.6).

When a treatment has an RR greater than 1, the risk of a bad outcome is increased by the treatment; when the RR is less than 1, the risk of a bad outcome is decreased, meaning that the treatment is likely to do good. For example, when the RR is 2.0 the chance of a bad outcome is twice as likely to occur with the treatment as without it, whereas an RR of 0.5 means that the chance of a bad outcome is twice as likely to occur without the intervention. When the RR is exactly 1, the risk is unchanged.”

RR 7.6 IS A BIG DEAL!
If Dr. Verstraeten’s results were based on solid analysis, WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

If Dr. Verstraeten’s results were reckless, and should have produced a RR of < 1, WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

"And as already mentioned, we can’t assume a priori the children who got more shots in the first month were the same in any other way. Most likely they weren’t, or they wouldn’t have got more shots in the first month."
You didn't bother to read the transcript of the meeting discussing Verstraeten's results: http://thinktwice.com/simpwood.pdf

If Dr. Verstraeten is as incompetent as you say, he should have been fired on the spot at that meeting. That didn't happen. They spent money and 2 days on that report. Participants were flown in from around the country.

Toto, we know what an RR is here. That doesn’t change the fact that your sentence, “ANY RR OVER 1 IS SIGNIFICANT!” is wrong in at least three different ways. I’d tell you how, but that really isn’t a substitute for actually learning how to properly interpret research results; it’s much better to learn such things in context.

My wife had home made zapper with almost no results too, but later on she used Super Ravo Zapper http://www.super-ravo-zapper.com a her problems with asthma and herpes was gone. So I don’t thing home made zapper are any good.

Autism is curable in some (or most ) of cases as I know couple alternative doctors with great results.

Some parasites in intestines could prevent other pathogens to sprout, but to be honest, they can cause sudden death as well, so better to avoid them from having them in the body.